Dandelion

No those aren't dandelions. They are buffalo berries. In Kootenay National Park. This post eventually will discuss a dandelion or two. Just bear with me on that one for a little bit. Be patient. We'll get there.

Of the six Parks Canada National Parks we visited in Alberta and British Columbia this summer, Kootenay National Park was our favorite. I feel confident making that statement and if our agenda had gone a little differently, I can confidently say that I could have totally seen things going an alternate way. Not that we were looking to necessarily anoint a favorite park from our week in Canada or anything. And not that everything we did in five full days in the Canadian Rockies wasn't just incredible to make us fall madly in love with the area generally. But Kootenay was for sure the best. 

Besides the amazing mountains and gorgeous water we saw in pretty much every park, Kootenay beat out its neighbors for two reasons: (1) it was the only Park in which we hiked (like, seriously hiked; not walking from a parking lot along a paved path to an overlook or something) and (2) well, that's the dandelion part of the story.

I like hiking. Like once per vacation like hiking. I don't need to do it a lot. Just like once in a week's vacation. The hike in Kootenay by the way...incredible. But we'll get to that. And sooner than we'll get to the dandelions. I promise.

Kootenay National Park. The view from the trailhead.

But first...some history. Not real history. History from this blog.

The last time we hiked in a National Park, it was in California's Sequoia National Park just about two years ago before we set off for Canada. We did an early morning walk on what we assumed would be a well-traveled and busy trail and what we hoped would get us some sightings of a black bear or two. The second part came true. We saw three different black bears pretty close to us while we walked. But it wasn't on a trail packed with people. In fact, we didn't see anyone else the whole of that morning walk. So effectively, we were alone with no cell service on a trail with bears nearby and no bear spray on hand. Not too smart, right? Nothing bad happened or even came close to happening but still...not too smart.

We were determined that if we hiked in Canada (and I really wanted to in a low impact way) that we were NOT going to hike around bears alone without bear spray. So rather than wing it and do things alone like we did in Cali in 2023, we looked for an organized, guided hike to shepherd us along in bear country. And if you believe the signs like pretty much everywhere we traveled west of Calgary this year, the whole place is bear country. Fortunately for us, Parks Canada has a few guided hike options.

We picked something called the Stanley Glacier hike, which sounds like it's a hike to a glacier but it's totally not. Apparently, the area around Kootenay and Yoho National Parks is rich in more than just mountains, lakes, rivers and wildlife. And if you look in the right spots, there are also a ton of fossils just lying around on the ground. I like fossils and I really like the "relatively easy" description of the trail on the website. Fossils, and not the glacier named after the same dude that the Stanley Cup is named after, are the feature of the Stanley Glacier Hike. I'm all in! Sign us up!

At the Stanley Glacier hike trailhead. Snowshoe hare. Prettier in winter when they are all white.

So we are at the trailhead at 7:30 am on a crisp Sunday late June morning (if I'm remembering right we are talking high 40s / low 50s as a temperature) ready to go with our guide for the day Steve, a dude with a business degree who just figured it would fit him a whole lot better if he spent a lot more time in the great outdoors than behind a desk doing what he was educated to do. I totally respect that.

I'll say a few words about this Steve guy in a paragraph or two but the first thing he says to us (after we signed the waiver form, of course) is that (and I'm paraphrasing here) there's pretty much no way you will see a bear on this hike. Bear country? Yes! Bears on this hike in late June before the buffalo berries and all other kinds of berries are available for easy eating trail-side? No. Not a chance.

That's OK. We didn't take this hike to see bears. We took this guided hike in the hope that we'd find a fossil or two and so that in the event we came across a bear, we'd either have a critical mass to scare it or them away or if we faced a rush attack from a whole pack of bears, maybe there would be someone in the group slower than us. 

Kidding about the last thing. Probably. I mean when do bears hunt in a pack?

Steve.

So we are off. On a scheduled seven hour hike through not-right-now-bear country to go find some fossils. Maybe. Steve promises we'll take it slow and easy and stop a lot on the way there (or uphill) to learn about the kinds of creatures we might see in fossil form. I really want to find some fossils.

The hike is an interactive experience. There's learning on the way and we were encouraged to rotate who walked directly behind Steve so that he'd have a chance to interact with everyone in the group. This, as it turns out, would benefit both us and Steve. That Clark's nutcracker story I posted on my Banff post? Got that from Steve. 

Maybe 30 minutes or so into the walk, we started learning. We were each randomly assigned a fossil in photograph form on one rest stop; were then challenged to match them to an artist's rendering of what the creature or organism might have looked like on another rest stop; and then spent some time putting the whole cast of creatures in food chain order on a pee and rest break after that. Peeing in the woods.

I got something very unexciting with my fossil here. In my defense, the selection of our assigned photographs of fossils was completely blind. But it was made known pretty early that I picked (or was randomly assigned) the bottom of the food chain plant species. Did that kill the experience for me? Absolutely not. But it did allow me to guess where I fell when we got to the food chain exercise. I aced that stop!

Marpolia spissa. Bottom of the food chain. Oh yeah! That's totally me.

A couple of things before we get to how amazing this hike was.

First, let's clarify what we are looking for here. These are not fossils like the dinosaur fossils we looked for and barely (and I do mean barely) found in Utah five years ago. We are talking much more primitive life than that. See the marpolia fossil and artist's rendering above? That's the kind of thing we are seeking out. Although maybe a little more complex than the marpolia since I did, you know, have the bottom of the food chain organism assigned to me.

Time-wise, we are talking about 506 million years ago (dinosaurs, for perspective, date back as far as about 250 million years) in the Cambrian Era. Before internal skeletons. Before life on land. Before any sort of living creature was more than like a foot in length. And did they look like the artists' renderings we were provided with to illustrate our assigned fossils? Who knows. Apparently it's mostly a guess based on what current sea creatures look like. If there's any frame of reference that I can offer for what we were looking for (other than the marpolia), if you know what a trilobite was, maybe that tells you a little about what we were hoping to find somewhere in the Canadian Rockies in fossil form that day.

Second, let's spend a paragraph or so talking about this Steve guy. In the pantheon of most incredible tour guides on any continent addressing any subject whatsoever, Steve has to be pretty high up that list. In addition to pointing out buffalo berries and telling us bears can eat 200,000 berries per day AND proudly ditching business for the outdoors AND giving us the Clark's nutcracker story AND leading the whole group safely there and back again AND making connections with everyone on the hike AND telling us all about the creatures that became the fossils we were seeking, he also managed to describe to us why the Canadian and American Rocky Mountains are different AND put our existence and mass extinctions and climate change into perspective. How's that for a day hike? Certainly one of the best ever. Well done!

Food chain. Mine is at the very far right.

As I've already mentioned, this is not the first time we have looked for fossils. We haven't spent seven hours in the mountains walking to a place where there might be fossils but it's not our first rodeo here (although it may be our second). If we learned anything from the first time (again...Utah 2020) it's that not everything that dies becomes a fossil. It really takes a pretty specific set of circumstances to bury living organisms in the perfect kind of conditions to preserve them in an airless environment for thousands or millions of years.

And that is exactly what happened here in Kootenay. I guess modern science (which I believe; I do believe in science) has figured out that the organisms from all those millions of years ago that we were hoping to discover this past June were the victims of a sudden underwater silt avalanche that buried everything in its path. But not just some silt avalanche. One with particles so fine to enter any any body cavities and expel any damaging-to-preservation chemicals or compounds thus yielding a treasure trove of well-preserved fossils. 

Sound farfetched? It didn't to me. We got the same story around Dinosaur National Monument five years ago. Unusual climactic conditions. Natural event that concentrated and buried a number of (in that case) skeletons in one spot. No dying on the surface of the Earth and letting the creatures and the elements take the bodily remains. That's not how fossils get formed.

In the Rockies, all these fossils got preserved in a layer of shale, loose rock that breaks apart super easily and keeps basically falling down the mountain-sides as the land moves and people climb over it. You can actually see the band within the bare mountains where this loose rock is from. I would not want to be climbing on those faces, if I were ever inclined to do any vertical face mountain climbing. Which of course, I'm not.

Now...about that "relatively easy" hike. I guess that was true. There was some truth in advertising here. We certainly made it there and back and were never in real danger of dying or being seriously injured and we only had maybe one or two minor falls (and not us; the group as a whole). We also never really felt seriously out of breath or were exhausted or couldn't go on or needed airlifting out of there or anything like that. But it was challenging in spots, particularly traversing over a bunch of loose shale and just for me personally descending on any sort of rocky slope in general just makes me feel like my knees are constantly in danger of buckling. 

But this experience was worth it. So worth it. I know I've already raved in past posts from this trip about how gorgeous these mountains and the trees and rivers that come with them are from the driver's or passenger seat of a car. Try being in the middle of all that walking on your own two feet. Close to those trees. Seeing the mountains move as you walk closer and closer to them and the glaciers on top of them. Walking over and past and close to the rivers and streams and rapids and churning water.  Hearing (but not seeing; oh no not seeing) the many different kinds of warblers that summer up in the Canadian Rockies. Breathing that crisp clean air. Worth it.

Kootenay National Park. The shale is in the pale brown-yellow layer about halfway up the mountain on the left.

Know what else was worth it? Finding a fossil. 

We were told before we descended and then scoured the pile of shale in the valley at the farthest point of our hike that we were likely to find some fossils already placed on some of the larger boulders before us. That was great. We didn't understand how big or small these things were but at least we were likely to find something to look at. 

We were also told that near the largest boulder in the shale field there was a locker with some of the largest and most spectacular fossils found near where we were about to search. That was even better. Not only would we find something, we would find something pretty incredible. The "largest boulder" by the way looked like about four feet tall from the spot where we were told about all this. It turned out to be massive. Like probably 12 feet tall. Distance. What it does to your perspective...

So knowing that there are guaranteed fossils out there for me to see, I am of course not interested in any of those already found ones left by others and certainly not interested in those gorgeous amazing specimens in the locker. Oh no. I wanted to find one for myself that nobody else had ever flipped over a piece of shale and seen.

Did that happen? I have absolutely no idea. But pretty quickly (and I should absolutely note that remote from any of the guaranteed spots that we'd find fossils already laid out for us to see), I found one. Less than five minutes into the shale pile, I found a tiny little trilobite on a piece of yellow-ish shale. This thing was alive over 500 million years ago and is now perfectly preserved based on some freak accident of nature and on a Sunday afternoon in June in Canada, I was able to look at it in about perfect form. What kind of a wonderful world do we live in where I can do that?

Fossils: "Mine" (top) and something a bit more impressive (bottom).

So that covers the first thing that made Kootenay National Park the best Park of the trip. Now let's get to the dandelions.

The day after our fossil hike, we went back to Kootenay. We spent a couple of hours kayaking on the Columbia River near Radium Hot Springs near the southern entrance to Kootenay. We figured we'd drive through the Park and see what the other parts of the place would hold for us. In particular, Kootenay was our great hope for multiple species of large mammals. Grizzlies. Black bears. Moose. Elk. Sheep. Goats.

Most of what we did on our drive through Kootenay that day was to stop at random spots and look. We saw amazing landscapes and pretty much no wildlife on these stops and that was a theme throughout the day. And the whole trip in general, really.

But right after we entered the Park we found ourselves driving towards a gorgeous green lake on the right hand side of the road called Olive Lake. We had to stop and look. It looked that inviting. So we pulled into the turn lane, noticed very briefly that there were some people out of their car ahead of us looking right towards us and then looked to the right...black bear. Pull over. Put the car in park. And watch.

I have seen black bears in the wild before. Mount Rainier. Vermont. Maybe somewhere on I-81 in the middle of Pennsylvania. Grand Teton. And of course Sequoia National Park on foot without any bear spray. But I have never, ever been ten feet from a black bear in a car just watching him (or her, but most likely him) for 15 or 20 minutes just doing what he was doing which was pretty much being a bear in Canada and eating...you guessed it...dandelions.

For some sort of perspective here, the two photographs above were taken with my iPhone. It's an iPhone 15 Pro so it's a pretty good camera but it's still pretty limited when it comes right down to it from a zoom perspective. We were that close. Admittedly, I did hop out of the driver's seat and get into the back seat and drop the back seat window to get even closer. The view was that crystal clear. We were so close. We could hear this bear crunching on the dandelions, if that even seems possible. What a huge privilege to be able to do this. 

If there is a great time to look for bears, it's first thing in the morning or maybe towards the end of the day. This bear was out munching on dandelions at about 1 in the afternoon. We appreciate how lucky we were here. We also appreciate the quality and length of our time just a few feet from this bear. Particularly considering we wouldn't get anywhere near this close to any animal that didn't have wings or wasn't a golden-mantled ground squirrel in the rest of our time in the Canadian Rockies.

So super lucky. 

Bear close ups. NOT from the iPhone.

So apparently bears and dandelions are a thing. We mentioned this encounter to a Park ranger later in the week and he told us that bears love dandelions at this time of year considering there are no berries available for easy eating. Who knew?

We saw. We watched. We moved on. It would never be better all week from a creature spotting standpoint.

With nature, you can't always get what you want. We've learned that on pretty much every continent we've visited. I am sure we can count a disappointment in a lot of places that we have traveled over the past 12 years. We hope for quantity and quality of experiences in nature wherever we go but one small moment of quality can outweigh all the quantity we had hoped for, For me, Kootenay delivered on both. So, sure, the quantity of wildlife sightings was very disappointing but this was the best bear sighting for me ever and seven hours walking through Kootenay were in no way any sort of disappointment. 

Best park winner, Canada 2025. Kootenay. Against super strong competition, this place was still the best we had.

That's A Paddlin'

As of my 57th birthday (late June of this year), I had never, ever set foot or sat butt in a canoe in my life. At least I don't think I had. And if I'm wrong then surely I have not participated in the paddling part. I mean, why on Earth would I, really? What purpose would that serve me? And where would I even be finding a canoe in my life or travels? I mean I've ridden in plenty of boats in my time roaming around this planet...but a canoe? I don't think so.

Now, I guess if you really wanted to, you could maybe make a case that my trip into the Mbamba swamp in Uganda in 2023 took place in a sort of canoe but those boats were either pole driven or fitted with an outboard motor. In my small-minded view of things, canoes have paddles and not poles and are powered by people, not motors.

If there was ever a place that I would consider a canoe ride appropriate and fitting for the place, it would be Canada. I have no idea why. Canoes were used in places as far flung as what are today the Netherlands and Nigeria like ten or more millennia ago. Canadians (or people who were living there before Canada was Canada) are by no means the inventors of the canoe. But the Great White North just seemed like the place to paddle a canoe for the first time. So when we started planning this trip and there was an opportunity to take a canoe ride where paddling was required and supervision was offered...I was in! All in! Let's break another first-time barrier. 

Isn't that what this whole thing is about, after all?

Canoes for rent. Moraine Lake. Banff National Park. The top picture is Lake Louise.

There are many, many places to rent a canoe in the Canadian Rockies. You can spend $100 CAD and get an hour's paddling in at Emerald Lake in Yoho National Park. Or if you feel like spending a little more, you can get the same amount of time for a cool $160 CAD at Moraine Lake. We didn't take either of those options. If we were going to be canoeing for the first time, we wanted someone watching over us and we wanted a bit of purpose. Plus, it cost just a bit less we'd be OK with that.

Our solution? A guided interpretive tour of the wetlands alongside the mighty (well, it becomes mighty a lot further along anyway...) Columbia River. We figured we'd go find some birds along the edges of the water and in the vegetation growing in the wetlands and if we just happened to have some company in the form of some other canoe-ers and more importantly a trained guide to help us out if anything went wrong, well then all the better. Plus at a cost of just $59 CAD per person for a whole two hours, we'd get something we wanted without paying an arm and a leg. 

Columbia River Paddle out of Invermere, if you must know.

And not that $160 CAD is an arm or a leg or anything.

So how was my first time in a canoe? Honestly, I don't know. Because I still haven't been in a canoe.

On the water on the might Columbia River. But not in a canoe.

So we get to Columbia River Paddle a little early for our guided wetlands tour and we check in. We are the only two signed up. Nobody else. No other people. No numbers. But still guided. One guide (Dominick...and guessing on the spelling) for the two of us. Just the two of us. Cool! 

Ever been in a canoe before? Nope. Figured we'd learn. Ever been in a kayak? Nope to that too. No real experience rowing or paddling any human powered craft ever. Total rookies. Give us life vests and tell us what to do and we'll hope for the best. And no, this is not actually a transcript.

After some quick discussion, it was decided a canoe was probably not for us. Maybe a kayak would be better. Less "tippy". And yes, that was the actual word used. Tippy. We don't want tippy. Kayak sounds fine. No tippy.

That dream of canoeing in Canada? Dead right there and then. At least for 2025. Stupid safety and tippy-ness. Maybe some other time. These blog posts about this trip seem to contain a running list of future Canadian Rockies activities. Maybe canoeing should be added to the list. Maybe.

So we kayaked. In the wetlands. In Canada. On the Columbia River that we followed for a day in Oregon about seven years beforehand. We sat in this plastic shell of a boat and got pushed into the water. We stayed afloat. We got used to the paddling action. We learned how to stop and turn and how to not tip the boat over or anywhere close. We traveled past reeds and under a bridge. We saw some bald eagles and plenty of red-winged blackbirds and heard a lot more birds than we saw. 

And yes, I do know that I can do this in northern Virginia or Maryland or Washington, DC. I know I can go rent a kayak and paddle along the Potomac River or on the Chesapeake Bay or somewhere like that. I know I can pass by wetlands and hear birds. Heck, I even know a spot or two where I can find some nesting bald eagles (hello, Dyke Marsh Wildlife Preserve). Maybe not bald eagles nesting right on the water but it's not too far off. 

Why does this sort of thing even get put in a travel blog when I can do exactly the same thing minutes from my home but choose not to?

Good question.

But seriously...are you looking at the pictures I'm posting here? Those mountains. That crystal clear and super, super calm water. And besides all that, the sense that time is standing still. The idea that work doesn't matter because it's hundreds of miles away and completely inconsequential right at that moment. There's a fee proposal to review? Who cares. Not me. Not on that water. Not beside those mountains. 

Our guide, Dominick (top). And a beaver dam (bottom). Not finding THAT in northern Virginia. 

This whole paddling thing, by the way...not so tough on really calm water with like zero wind and even less current. Maybe that's an obvious statement. I think for our first time in a kayak, I was grateful for the situation. It allowed me to relax and gaze at the Rockies and the few birds and especially the bald eagle nest that eventually revealed two very, very large chicks we saw without worrying about anything else like staying upright or fighting the river. 

I am pretty confident that I didn't lose much being in a kayak rather than a canoe. Yes, sure, there's this romantic image I had of being in some mountain lake (I know the Columbia River is not a lake) and moving my decidedly-not-invented-in-Canada-but-somehow-very-Canadian canoe through the water with some effortless strokes of my paddle. Do I regret the kayak? Maybe just a little bit. I'll put the canoe on my list for next time and I'll stick to my convictions next time. Probably.

Now...when's my next kayaking trip? 

The second bald eagle in the middle photo (the one in the nest) is the baby. It's a pretty big baby.

Even The Losers

Our plan for the six Parks Canada National Parks that we visited this summer just west of Calgary was pretty simple. New day, new park. We picked a day to spend in a particular Park and we were pretty much all in for at least that day. Whatever we could figure out worth doing in the Park du jour, that's what we did. All of it. Total immersion. Total focus. We had a Banff day, a Kootenay day (or maybe day and a half), a Jasper Day and a Revelstoke / Glacier day. 

And yes, I know that's only five Parks. I can count.

So we did it that way for all of the Parks except Yoho National Park. And because we did it that way, Yoho had the very real possibility of being totally lost as a Park experience. We could very well have come back from Canada having just skipped Yoho. That wasn't our original intent. But it's all because we were losers before we even got on the plane to head to Canada. 

It wasn't supposed to be that way with Yoho National Park. We had big plans here. We centered our original agenda for that Park's day around a trip to Lake O'Hara and it looked like there were one or two other gems to spend time at. Yes, that's right, we picked lakes as the central activity in two different National Parks, after doing the same exact thing in Banff National Park with Lake Louise, Moraine Lake and maybe a couple of other bodies of water. Lake O'Hara sounds awesome. If I thought visitation to Moraine Lake was limited, Lake O'Hara seemed like it was even more secluded and tourist-free and therefore (in my small mind's eye) more desirable. Much more desirable. 

To get to Lake Louise and Moraine Lake in Banff National Park, I sat on a website for about 45 minutes with about 50,000 other people ahead of me to get some bus tickets. Lake O'Hara tickets don't work that way. It's not so easy with Yoho. Parks Canada conducts a lottery where over a period of three weeks, you can pay to submit entries with dates and times you'd like to visit Lake O'Hara. In the subsequent two weeks, entries are drawn at random and spots on buses are offered to those whose lottery tickets are drawn. We waited all two weeks for our one entry to be picked and we got nothing. No dice. No bus to Lake O'Hara. 

Can you get there some other way? Yes, you can. Not by getting last minute tickets saved for two days before you want to go like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. Not by paying a private tour operator to take you there like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. By hiking. 11 kilometers each way in bear country. No thanks. We lost. No visit to Lake O'Hara in 2025. Not for us. Like that, our Yoho plans were crushed.

Natural Bridge, Yoho National Park.

Maybe.

We reorganized. We stuffed parts of Yoho into the beginnings or ends of days when we were visiting other Parks. Was that ideal for us? Not at all. Our experience in Yoho would be totally dependent upon our ability to squeeze that Park into days when we already had a full plate of things to do. And it would also depend on some luck. And we already know that we weren't feeling lucky about Yoho after the whole lottery incident.

Our targets? Emerald Lake. Natural Bridge. Takakkaw Falls. Meeting of the Waters Confluent. Yes, that last one is a mouthful.

The luck we needed? Parking lots with empty parking spaces. We drove past the access road for Emerald Lake on the way to our hotel when we first landed in Canada. There is a sign by the side of the road advertising the condition of the parking lot near the lake. It said full. That was not the last time we saw this sign saying there were no parking spaces next to the Lake. We'd need to guess correctly on how early we'd need to get there in the morning or just get lucky later in the day when things had thinned out a bit. One of those two.

Our revised plan was this: schedule a drive to Emerald Lake and Natural Bridge early in the morning of Banff day and tack the Meeting of the Waters Confluent onto the end of one of our Kootenay days with a hope that we could make it to Takakkaw Falls in the morning on our return drive back to Calgary. Complicated enough? Squeezing in. I'm telling you. We definitely needed luck, particularly at Takakkaw Falls. If we got there too late on that last day and the parking lot was full, we'd have no other chance.

Emerald Lake. Yoho National Park.

We got right to it in Yoho on our first full day in Canada. Banff day was day one but because we planned on squeezing in Emerald Lake before doing what we had scheduled in Banff, Yoho was actually the first Park we intentionally visited on this trip. We just needed a parking space. We guessed at a 6:45 a.m. departure time from our hotel in Golden, BC. That would get us at Emerald Lake at about 7:30. Early enough? We'd see.

The sign on the access road said "yes" to availability and sure enough, when we rolled up to the edge of Emerald Lake, we found the parking lot about half full. Score! The first part of our Yoho plan worked. And spoiler alert and so I don't have to blow-by-blow the suspense of the rest of Yoho, so did everything else. We made it to all the limited parts of Yoho that we planned. What was potentially a throwaway ended up being anything but. 

I'm also going to skip Natural Bridge and the Confluent in this post. Natural Bridge is on the way to (or from, depending on your perspective) Emerald Lake and it's worth a stop for sure. Same with the Meeting of the Waters on the way to Takakkaw Falls. Dip your hands in the water. At both spots.

Emerald Lake is incredible. The color of the water is literally emerald green and the setting in the woods is so secluded and scenic. It's amazing. There's a trail that leads down the far side of the Lake and I assume that path wraps around the entire Lake to the hotel (which is really a series of cabins) at the side of the Lake closest to the parking lot. It must be a gorgeous hike through the woods. We probably made it down one half of one long side of the Lake (the hotel side which is not super wooded to a point) before turning back. Hey...we had other things to do that day and we are not super-committed hikers on normal days.

The color of that water...

Here's what I don't get about Emerald Lake. Having visited Emerald Lake and then Lake Louise in the same day, it is difficult for me to understand why so many people flock to Lake Louise. So sure, there's a huge hotel there and there's a shuttle bus service that takes people there all day, every day in the summer. But there could be the exact same shuttle bus thing set up at Emerald Lake and there's already a hotel there. I do understand that the amount of people who we found at Lake Louise would totally overwhelm Emerald Lake. That's not really what I'm confused by.

It's this. 

If what I read in guide books and on Parks Canada's website is true, it is basically impossible to park your car at Lake Louise after about 6 o'clock in the morning. I bet Lake Louise is beautiful when there are way fewer people there but why take a chance on fighting for a parking spot there so early when you can go to Emerald Lake and just roll up at 7:30 and park with no competition. And probably for an hour or so after as well. I'll take finding a spot two hours later in the morning at Emerald Lake with probably fewer people at the Lake itself over getting up and setting up before dawn to get to Lake Louise. And for sure if I'm staying at hotel at a lake, I'm staying at Emerald Lake without a second thought.

It was misty the morning we visited Emerald Lake so I can't provide a true comparison to somewhere like Moraine Lake or Lake Louise which we viewed without mist. What it would have looked like in the mid-day (or morning sun, for that matter)? Can't say. I know it was cool and colorful and mysterious when we visited. And that was just fine with us. It was magical. Maybe we need to hit it later in the day on our next Canadian Rockies trip. Assuming we can find parking.

The Meeting of the Waters Confluent. Yoho National Park.

We followed the same sort of script for Takakkaw Falls as we put together for Emerald Lake. Up early. No breakfast at the hotel. Yes breakfast and coffee at Tim Hortons (no apostrophe). And on the road at time which we hoped would be good enough to get a parking spot near the Falls. Because Takakkaw Falls was on our last day in the Rockies agenda, we hedged our bets a bit and got up a bit earlier than for Emerald Lake.

A 6:15ish departure would get us to the Falls about an hour later. And yes, at 7:15 in the morning, there are plenty of spots in the parking lot near Takakkaw Falls. And there probably would be for another hour or maybe two. Guessing a bit on that last part.

I will admit I'm not much of a waterfalls guy. I will forever be impressed by the power of Niagara Falls, especially from the Canadian side. I was underwhelmed by Victoria Falls on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border. And I guess Oregon's famous Multnomah Falls was impressive enough but I've been to my fair share of waterfalls which are just a trickle to a stream of water falling over a cliff or the side of a mountain. Maybe I'm un-romantic about waterfalls. 

Takakkaw Falls for me is on the Niagara end of the spectrum. Let me explain.

First of all, the setting for these falls (or is it this falls?) is about as gorgeous as you can get. I mean, it's the Canadian Rockies for crying out loud and if it wasn't clear from my post about Banff, I'm pretty darned impressed by the Canadian Rockies.

Second, it's all glacier water. Does that make it more spectacular to look at or hear or feel? Probably not. But as a concept, I'm more on board with glacier water waterfalls than other types. Plus if I actually swallow some accidentally, I'm probably better off than imbibing some Niagara water. And yes, the water is in the air a good distance from the Falls. When we got to the parking lot, I felt it raining. It wasn't rain. Apparently my Tims wasn't kicking in quite yet.

Third. It's tall and there's a good volume of water coming over the Falls. It's about twice as tall as Multnomah Falls and over three times as tall as Niagara. This is a serious waterfall with some serious noise and some serious spray. If I truly am un-romantic about waterfalls, it's because I probably appreciate the power of a lot of water falling from a great height and I don't get that at every waterfall. Takakkaw Falls has all that.

But the real reason I loved our experience at Takakkaw Falls is that you can walk pretty much to the bottom of the falls and feel, hear, smell and, yes, even taste the power of those Falls up close and personal. We visited in early July and it was cold. Like not t-shirt weather at all (I was wearing a t-shirt). But the crispness of the air and water in the early morning sunshine was just amazing. It was so worth the less than a mile or so walk from the parking lot to the base of the Falls through the pines. 

Lake O'Hara? Who needs it? 

Although honestly, I still want to go. There is a sign to Lake O'Hara on the Trans-Canada Highway that we passed about nine times and every time we passed it, it was like it was taunting us for not winning the bus tickets lottery. Oh well...put that on the list for next time along with the sunnier trip to Emerald Lake.

Great waterfalls deserve portrait pictures. 

Did our Yoho experience suffer because we broke it up into four sites over three separate days? Maybe. But probably not really. 

When we were done with our up close visit to Takakkaw Falls, we did a quick search for some birds. HAVE to look for the birds. I was hoping to spot a variable thrush, which our Merlin app had picked up on the way to the Falls. Like our experience in most wooded areas of the planet which we have visited to look for birds, what we hear far outstrips what we see. We got nothing. 

But we did have a fleeting but brand new birding experience in Yoho. 

One of our great hopes for this trip was that we would find some of the migrating warblers that we see near our home in Virginia in the spring and fall living out their lives in their Canadian summer-ing grounds. By and large, we were not super successful. Despite the pretty good look we got at a yellow-rumped warbler on the edge of Banff National Park and the many, many yellow warblers in Calgary's Inglewood Bird Sanctuary, we mostly heard way more than we saw. And legitimately, it's often this way with warblers, which are super small and camouflage well and will not sit still.

But at Emerald Lake, we managed to find a Wilson's warbler, a little yellow bird with a black cap on its head, and we were able to follow his flitting for maybe 10 minutes or so. It was not one of the most spectacular bird sightings we've had in our lives but it was good enough for a new (for us) warbler species. As a measure of how poor this sighting was, my best picture of this bird is below.

Super exciting? Actually yes. Any time we see a new bird species and it's not like all brown like sparrows, it's a genuine thrill. I have no idea when we will ever see a Wilson's warbler again, so for me, yes this was super exciting. 

It is difficult to truly separate the different Parks in the Canadian Rockies that man has decided to draw boundaries between. It's a completely arbitrary mapping that makes no difference to the beauty of this place. Nonetheless, someone did that and I am (to a great extent) abiding by those artificial boundaries as a measure of judging the quality of parts of the natural landscape that we explored in late June and early July.

Yoho was incredible. The mountains and the water were just as stunning as we found in Banff National Park, even if we weren't able to concentrate our time in Yoho quite the way we did in other Parks. If nothing else, Yoho gave us both something memorable on this trip and a couple of spots to explore further on a second Canadian Rockies trip. Like we don't have all sorts of other places on our list. 

Blue Canadian Rockies

So we finally made it to Canada. 

A four day workweek, an early Friday morning flight out of Dulles and we were on the ground in Calgary at about noon. Love that two hour time difference going west! We cleared customs and immigration quickly (not difficult to get into Canada) and then hopped in a rental car and started driving. A quick stop for lunch and we were off headed west towards the six Parks Canada National Parks we planned to spend the next five plus days in. 

Lunch was poutine. I mean...what else would it be?

About 60 minutes later straight west along the Trans-Canada Highway, some pretty large mountains started showing up as a continuous wall of jagged peaks ahead of us. Welcome to the Canadian Rocky Mountains!!!! This is what we traveled to western Canada to see and breathe and live for the better part of a week.

Our gateway to the Canadian Rockies was Banff National Park. It was the first Park we would pass through on the way to (in order) Yoho, Kootenay, Jasper, Glacier and Mount Revelstoke National Parks. We spent more time driving and stopping in Banff than any of the other five, including spending a morning and early afternoon shopping and eating (more poutine!!) in the Park's namesake town and making a couple of birdwatching stops at Vermilion Lakes just north of the town.

That drive through that Park! What an introduction to our week! 

I've been to the Rocky Mountains in the United States a few times: 2001, 2011, 2018, 2020, maybe one other year but I don't think so. If I can credibly say that I wasn't that impressed by a mountain range that features 53 peaks of 14,000 feet or more in the state of Colorado alone, that's the statement I'd like to make here. I wasn't that impressed. They are not the Andes or the Alps or even the Bitterroots. I just don't think they look that mountain-y. I even looked back at my pictures that I took in 2020 in Rocky Mountain National Park to be sure and yep...not that impressed. Call me crazy.

But the Canadian Rockies based on our time in Banff and beyond? Now these are some mountains. They are far, far more mountain-y (yes, that's twice with that word). The peaks are sharp; they stand apart from each other much more distinctly; and the slopes are ragged and jagged sometimes and so flat in other locations. They are in fact so flat in some spots that it honestly looks like some giant creature stuck its hands in the planet and pulled a giant chunk of the surface of the earth up into a 45 degree slope and left it there. 

And apparently, I'm right about the whole thing: the Rockies in Canada and the United States are not the same mountains. They were formed at different times in the Earth's history by different tectonic action. Sure they are connected today, but geologically they are completely distinct. That makes them different. And the Canadian Rockies had one other thing that the American Rockies didn't: glaciers. It is the work of glaciers that gives the mountains in Canada their shape and appearance as the slow flows of ice have ripped into the mountains over the millennia that they have worked their magic. 

And they come at you in waves as you drive. More and more and more, sometime made even better and more dramatic by the tunnels that form the wildlife crossings over the highway. The tunnel constricts your view and then frames the mountains beyond as you drive through.

The other thing that made an instant impression on the drive: the water. I can't remember ever being impressed by the color of a river or stream or brook or whatever size body of water you want to pick that's not an ocean. But I'm telling you, the green color of the water running by the side of the road through Banff National Park was otherworldly. It was stunning. And this is from just driving down the highway at 110 or so kilometers per hour. I've never seen anything like it.

Apparently, it's something called rock flour that makes the water that color. The glaciers grind the rock of the mountains beneath them into fine powder that when dissolved or suspended in the rivers prevents the transmission of the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum which are not green and blue. And since all the water running through Banff is pretty much glacial melt, that rock flour makes all the water there strikingly green-blue in color. I swear I will never forget that color.

It is perhaps appropriate that I was instantly fascinated by the color of the water in Banff because the centerpieces of our agenda for that Park were two of the area's most famous mountain lakes: Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. And of course, we were all in!

Here's where things get interesting. There are several ways to access Lake Louise. You can drive close to the lakeshore but apparently that parking lot fills up by sunrise (that would be about 5 a.m. in the summer). You can stay at the ultra-expensive Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise (anything with the word "chateau" in its name has to be ultra-expensive) but that's...well...ultra-expensive. Walking is certainly an option, but definitely not a quick option. Or you can take a shuttle bus run by Parks Canada or a private tour operator. Tickets are limited. 

If you want to take a Parks Canada shuttle, most of the tickets are available mid-Spring (April 16 this year) with the rest being released two days before the date of the shuttle run. We got tickets on the initial release date. I signed on two minutes after the top of the hour and there were about 50,000 people in line ahead of me. It took about 45 minutes to get through that line but I got some tickets for mid-afternoon (NOT when I wanted them). Tickets from Parks Canada are cheap at $8 CAD. Some private operators were charging $125 CAD when we got the but departure point.

And if you want to get to Moraine Lake? Walk or bus. No cars allowed near Moraine Lake. The $8 bus ticket gets you to both Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. Pretty sweet deal if you have the time. We'll talk about that later.

Lake Louise, Banff National Park. Not a great picture looking into the afternoon sun.

I can't tell you how excited I was to visit Lake Louise. This was one of my top sights on my pre-trip must see list. The payoff here was going to be amazing, I just knew it. After we secured our shuttle tickets we debated between going to Moraine Lake or Lake Louise first and ultimately we decided Lake Louise was the one we had to do first. That way, if somehow our afternoon trip went slower than planned, we'd make sure we saw the best one.

What a nightmare! This place was so packed that it was pretty much completely non-enjoyable. Was it beautiful? Well, it could have been. It is admittedly gorgeously sited and framed so well by the mountains and the color of the water is just an amazing dark green. But so many people. It was difficult to move around and to take pictures and just in general enjoy the place. I have a small list of big disappointments that includes Kyoto's Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, most of New Zealand and about the entire city of Rome. Lake Louise is now on that list. We spent maybe 15 minutes there. Maybe.

Moraine Lake, on the other hand? Amazing. So peaceful. Nestled in the mountains with snow on their slopes in late June. Very, very few people. No hotel guests. No people who drove to Lake Louise parking lot. And (and I'm speculating here) no people who only wanted to see Lake Louise and skipped Moraine Lake. It made all the difference. In a big way.

Moraine Lake, Banff National Park. I don't know how many versions of the top photograph I took.

We spent about an hour at Moraine Lake. We walked along the edge of the long and narrow lake almost its entire length in the pine (and other types of trees, I'm sure...) forest. We climbed over rocks and walked over streams feeding the lake. We spent time gazing out over the water and contemplating how amazing the luminous blue layer was that seemed to be on top of the water (these pictures are real and unfiltered; the water is really that color). We slowed down. We didn't have to dodge people or wait for people to move so we could enjoy the view. It was likely the most peaceful experience we had all week. It was just perfect.

And can I say...thank God we did this last. If we had done it first, I know that we would have rushed it so we could have spent more time at Lake Louise. Sometimes decisions that seem unimportant on vacation end up being huge. I would not have wanted to have cut short our time on that lakeshore to get to tourist central over at Lake Louise. We got the beauty of that place along with a sense of calm.

We also got some idea of the power of nature.

There is a giant pile of rocks at the parking lot end of Moraine Lake. You can climb on top of it. We didn't, preferring to parlay our afternoon bus ticket into our walk down the lakeside. The rock pile looks manmade. It's not. It's the result of a centuries-old rock avalanche or maybe several avalanches. The full-size pine tree trunks floating in the water at that same end of the lake are also the result of avalanches over the winter season. It's amazing the destructive force that these avalanches have, whether they be snow or rock sliding down a mountainside all of a sudden. There are signs all over the Canadian Rockies advertising the danger of avalanches. I'd love to see one in person. From a distance obviously. 

So about that time thing...it does take a while to do all this with Parks Canada on the shuttle. We had a bus slot between 3 and 4 p.m. We arrived 10 minutes before 3 but waited 20 minutes for the bus to get there. We hit Lake Louise, realized it wasn't for us and joined the Moraine Lake line at about 3:40 p.m. A trip to Moraine, a nice leisurely walk, back in line for a bus and then arrival back at the bus stop had us getting off the bus at a bit after 6 p.m. All told, about 3 hours and 15 minutes. And that's with 15 minutes maximum at Lake Louise. Not quick.

More Moraine Lake.

Moraine Lake wasn't the last lake we visited in Banff National Park. No sir! We did some others without shuttle buses. There are a string of lakes in the Park on the way to Jasper National Park to the north and west. We stopped by a few on the way back from Jasper including the unbelievable swimming-pool-blue Peyto Lake, which is visible from an overlook after maybe a half mile or three quarters of a mile sometimes steep walk from the nearby parking lot. Peyto Lake is shown below and it really is that color of blue. Before you go explaining away that color as just like a backyard swimming pool, remember some pool bottoms are painted light blue. No paint at Peyto.

I supposed you can walk down to Peyto Lake. I don't know how you do that. I'm sure it's more than a half mile plus from a parking lot. Despite the color of Peyto Lake, Moraine was my favorite Banff lake. We found a connection that was deeper than we got at any other lake on this trip. That walk was definitely my favorite non-strenuous walk of the trip. Who knows....maybe Moraine is the same color as Peyto when viewed from above at a great distance. I don't think I'll ever know and it really doesn't matter to me. Moraine Lake wins Banff National Park for me. That and all those incredible mountains.

Peyto Lake. Banff National Park.

But Banff had one more surprise.

One thing that we didn't see a lot of in Banff National Park was wildlife. We expected a lot of deer and elk all over the place and maybe some bighorn sheep on the mountains or hills and at least one or two bears. On the bear side of things, we definitely had a preference for grizzlies, but heck, we'd settle for black bears. We expected wildlife pretty much like we saw in Yellowstone National Park in 2020 minus the bison. 

We got almost nothing. We saw two deer the day we devoted to exploring the town of Banff and most of the National Park of the same name and, sure, we found about maybe a half dozen bighorn sheep towards the eastern edge of the Park as we cruised down the Highway at about 110 back to Calgary as we exited the Parks but that was it. No mammals really to speak of. That was probably the most disappointing aspect of this whole trip, because it wasn't just in Banff.

But we did see a Clark's nutcracker. It's a bird. And funnily enough, we also saw our first and best sighting of this bird at Moraine Lake.

The Clark's nutcracker is not a new species of bird for us. We saw at least one at Crater Lake in Oregon in 2018 (there's a picture of one on my Crater Lake blog post). It's not a particularly remarkable bird to look at. But we didn't know its story before we visited Canada. And its story is pretty incredible. 

Clark's nutcracker. Appropriately with a nut between its beak.

The Clark's nutcracker lives around a species of tree called the whitebark pine. It's not the only type of tree that the Clark's nutcracker lives near but the opposite is true, meaning the whitebark pine only lives near the Clark's nutcracker. And that's because that bird is pretty much responsible for the entire survival of the whitebark pine.

Here's the story we were told (which totally checks out in an independent fact check courtesy of the United States National Park Service). Like most or all pine trees out there, the whitebark pine's seed are contained within the namesake pine cones that grow all over the tree. When the cones are on the tree, the seeds are viable, but when they fall off the tree, the seeds inside the cones spill out and lose their viability fairly quickly. The cones of the whitebark pine don't open on the tree, just when they fall off, but the Clark's nutcracker has just the right length and strength beak to dig into the cone and grab some seeds. 

The Clark's nutcracker doesn't eat all the seeds it extracts from the whitebark pine's cones. It actually plants some in the ground. Sometimes near the parent tree and sometimes far away. This planting behavior is pretty much the only way new whitebark pines will grow. All because of a loud bird that lives in the forests. 

We didn't learn this story from any sort of display in a museum or signboard at Moraine Lake. We were on a guided hike the day after visiting Banff when we told our guide about our birdwatching hobby and the birds we had seen so far on our trip, including the Clark's nutcracker. In response to that comment, he dropped this story on us which is quite frankly just amazing. Who knew? It helps to talk with people sometimes on vacation. You get the strangest information sometimes. 

Clark's nutcracker. Moraine Lake. I'll never forget that story. I can't wait to pass it on.

Mountains. Rivers. Lakes. Clark's nutcracker. That's our Banff National Park story for 2025. It was both the first and last Parks Canada National Park we set foot in on this trip. Now it's the first one in this blog. 

Yoho next, I'm thinking.

One last look at mountains and pines. Banff National Park.